Telestream’s Lightspeed Live Stream for Auburn University
July 18, 2019
Telestream, a provider of workflow automation, processing and quality monitoring and management solutions for the production and distribution of video, has announced that Auburn University – a public research university in Auburn, AL – has chosen Lightspeed Live Stream to live stream special events, such as graduation ceremonies, sports events and other activities.
Lightspeed Live Stream takes live video feeds from production switchers, video routers, ISO cameras, or other sources and streams them simultaneously to the University’s Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube channels, as well as its own website.
From its production facilities in the Athletic Video Services Building, Auburn Athletics also uses a companion product from Telestream—Lightspeed Live Capture—to ingest and record live video of sports and special events onto their network attached storage system. An added attraction of the system is that both the stream and capture applications run on the same server hardware simultaneously.
While the University has contracted with ESPN to produce and deliver exclusive live video of its Auburn Tigers Southeastern Conference (SEC) sporting events that the major sports network streams, the use of the integrated Lightspeed Live Capture solution constitutes a completely separate and unrelated workflow. During live games and special events, Lightspeed Live Capture is used to create an archive of Auburn’s valuable sports footage that can later be repurposed into fan engagement videos, highlights reels, and other promotional materials. It’s also used to record live events video into the archive, while Lightspeed Live Stream simultaneously streams video to social media.
“Our goal was to find a robust, reliable solution that could provide streaming of multiple feeds to various social media platforms simultaneously and recording functionality that we needed, all from a single box. With Lightspeed Live from Telestream, we found the ideal streamlined solution,” said Weston Carter, Director of Video Services for Media Systems, Auburn University in Auburn, AL.
On the recording side, Auburn Athletics needs to record roughly 350 live events per year, amounting to thousands of hours of programming. For live football, baseball, softball, and basketball home games, this means recording live video produced in one of two control rooms in the Athletics Video Services Building. However, it could also mean recording live video feeds of ISO cameras at different playing fields, sports facilities and arenas across campus.
On the streaming side, the solution needs to run uninterrupted for long periods of time; for example, throughout football gamedays for pregame and ingame events. It must also be able to live stream important events to a mix of social media sites simultaneously, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
“Lightspeed Live Stream and Live Capture have proven to be affordable, user-friendly systems that run reliably on a single piece of hardware. And, Lightspeed Live Stream simultaneously delivers up to four video channels to the social platforms we need to stream to, all from one box,” said Carter.
“Since students make up a big part of our production team, we wanted to make sure that the Lightspeed Live solution would in fact be very easy to learn and use, yet robust enough for the tasks we need to perform. We found that our students could indeed jump on it and start managing the live streams and recordings. With this greater efficiency, we’re saving considerable time training students, who can quickly be entrusted to handle these important tasks independently. We’re now filling our social media channels faster, while preserving video of our cherished moments and heritage for posterity,” adds Carter.